October 31: Isaiah 44 15-17
Key Verse: Isaiah 44 17
And the rest of it he makes into a god, His carved image. He falls down before it and worships it, Prays to it and says, “Deliver me, for you are my god!”
Devotion:
When put into words like these we look at the act of making statues to worship as pretty silly; but it still goes on and it still is the same as it was back in the times of Isaiah. We may not use chalk to draw the lines, we may not use the same piece of wood we used to light the house fire with, but mankind still makes idols out of useless stuff!
We may be making an idol out of something else create by God and not wood, carvings, mouldings, or other ornate art-work; but we still take so many things as being more important than God in our lives. Anything we take as being more important that God is something else we are lifting up instead of God, or in other words, we are idolising it. Just setting time aside for God in our busy schedules becomes hard as we try to fit more and more into our lives.
Squeezing out God because we think it will make us happier to do things than to be with our God is about as good as taking half the stick we light the fire with and carving it into a small statue we can call our god. Taking the scraps of metal we have and melting them down into a statue we can represent as our god is rather a big slap in the face for God. We are effectively saying that we think more of scraps of metal than we do of our God! “But I don’t do things like that” I hear you all cry…
God has warned us over many things in our lives that we do without thinking. We shout out to our brothers and call them names. We look lustfully at others. We withhold food from the pour and starving. We go out and polish the car instead of coming to church. We take our Lord’s name in vain. There are so many things we could list that we think are not as bad as bowing down before a statue we have made, but in reality there are so many big things in our lives that we do ignore because everyone else does them – so why can’t we!
Points to Ponder:
Will you give in and have a go?
Or will you lift up the name of Christ?
October 30: Isaiah 43 22-24
Key Verse: Isaiah 43 24
You have bought Me no sweet cane with money, Nor have you satisfied Me with the fat of your sacrifices; But you have burdened Me with your sins, You have wearied Me with your iniquities.
Devotion:
How many times have you brought your sins before God this month? How many times have you opened up to Him and talked frankly with Him about what you are doing? And how many times have you thought, “what is the use because He is not listening at the moment” or something similar?
If we are very honest then we will admit to getting into places like this ourselves. We grow weary of listening to God and of His ways because we don’t see the immediate effects of what we ask for! There are going to be times when we ask for things and they will not be honoured immediately because God knows that the time is not right; we will not understand why and we may well turn round and blame Him for not answering. But it is the disobedience that wears God down…
When we grow weary we start to be disobedient toward God. This is not a unique situation because we do similar things to our parents when we are young and we do similar things to all sorts of people in charge as we go through life. Why then do we expect to be shown continual grace and mercy if we are not going to show continual obedience toward God? Now not everything that goes wrong is because of this over-simplified look at life, but there is a great truth is what God is showing Isaiah at this time.
When the going gets tough and people start failing, something new has to be done in order to re-ignite the flame that once grew bright within each of us. We may not like the way that God tries to re-light the fire and we would have nobody else to blame for those ways other than ourselves. So God gives us plenty of warning and plenty of time to listen. He goes far above and beyond what He should need to because He knows our obstinacy! Isaiah had to try over and over again to reach the people as they continued on in their own ways – the very same that we find ourselves doing nowadays, still working toward the same goal, Salvation through Christ Jesus.
Points to Ponder:
Do you grow weary of Christians ways?
Do you lose track of Christ’s commandments?
October 29: Isaiah 42 23-25
Key Verse: Isaiah 42 23
Who among you will give ear to this? Who will listen and hear for the time to come?
Devotion:
Isaiah had a rough time with trying to persuade the people of Israel that they were no longer listening to God; and it is a tough job to do when people are so caught up in worldly ways and have neglected to listen to God. It is a hard task to try and open peoples ears when they have forced them closed for fear of someone persuading them otherwise. It is a thankless task trying to work for the people who seem hell-bent on working against everything you stand for… but Isaiah continued, and so should we.
It may be easy enough to give in to the ways of the world and allow people to make up their own minds about God; but that is not Gods way! He continues to want us to show people the truth and open their eyes to what the world does to us. He does not want us to beat them into submission but rather to show them love and perseverance and allow them to see just how much He has done for us already. By us realising how much God has already done for us, we get a deeper understanding of where we should be heading.
The people of Israel had all but closed off their minds to anything from the scriptures. They had almost re-written the scriptures so they could be more comfortable in their own ways. God’s ways are not our own ways and we need to realise that. When we go off on our own ways we find it very difficult to keep going with God and find it much easier to give in to the ways of the world. That is not God’s plan!
As servants of Christ we need to make sure that we do what Christ wants in our lives and not what we think is best. We have this distorted view of the world because we live in the world. We think everything can be bent and shaped into something comfortable for us. God has very specific ways and that is why He gave the people of Israel so many explicit rules and regulations. We need to take notice of them to find out what God actually wants!
Points to Ponder:
Do you break rules regularly?
Have you tried applying God’s commandments?
October 28: Luke 19 11-14
Key Verse: Luke 19 11
Now as they heard these things, He spoke another parable, because He was near Jerusalem and because they thought the kingdom of God would appear immediately.
Devotion:
This is the parable of the nobleman who went to a far country and left some of his servants in charge. I am not going through the whole parable but just the first few verses to get a different insight into the parable. Jesus was telling this to the disciples so they would have something to look back on and compare to His life with them.
So the first point raised is that Jesus was telling them this parable now so that they would recognise the urgency of their work when he did not return immediately. He was going to leave them in charge of the church whilst He returned to Heaven for a while. We do not know how long that while is and is now coming close to 2000 years, but still we should be waiting with the same urgency and willingness to keep working as when Christ was amongst us as a man. When we read through the rest of the parable we see how the nobleman was pleased with the servants that worked but not with the servant who did nothing but wait!
The second point to raise was how Jesus described the nobleman as being hated by the citizens. This may be pointing to the fact that the Jews hated Jesus because He showed them up for what they were, or it could be in reference to the disciples and how they would each let Christ down before His return. We need to stay focused on God and focused on the commission that he has given each of us – to go out and tell people about Him and about His return. Any of us found lacking in this respect may not get the rewards we think we are due!
God is just and He will not be bending the rules just because we said that we loved Him at some stage in our lives. It is what we do now and the work we do for Him that counts. If we go about chasing people away from Him, then we have failed Him. If we go about being quiet and waiting for His return keeping ourselves safe, then we have failed Him. We need to focus on reaching the people who cannot see hope. Yes it is hard work!
Points to Ponder:
Do you know you are safe with Christ?
Are you ignoring others to keep yourself safer?
October 27: Matthew 13 31-32
Key Verse: Matthew 13 32
which indeed is the least of all the seeds; but when it is grown it is greater than the herbs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches.”
Devotion:
When I read about mustard plants I think of the mustard plants here in the UK which look more like grass than any bush or tree. But then when people talk about pepper trees I always think of a huge tree some 50 feet tall when most people think about a bush or small tree. It is all relative because we grow up in different places with different climates and environments.
We should not expect all our lives to be the same then either but to be as varied as the places and times we live in. Our lives are very different now to the lives of people just 50 years or 100 years ago. Our lives as Christians are going to be very varied as well and not all carved out of the same piece of wood. I was reading the other day the passages from the Old Testament where it talks about people using wood to make all sorts of things for the house and then using the left-overs to make idols that they could worship. To me that is totally alien, but to them, totally real!
God knows that we live in very different parts of the world where there are big differences. He knows we are going to face very different temptations and hardships. But He continues to prepare just the right environment to overcome all that will come up against us. Our strength and resolve is not going to come through how much we have had to endure over our lives but rather from the input we have had during our lives.
If we want to be able to come out on top then we should aim to take in as much experience as we can from God and from His ways; that way we will get just the right input to overcome the hurdles we are going to face. The problem comes when we lose sight of God and allow the world to turn over all we have done against God in the first place. Just because the hardship or temptation looks so much bigger than our own personal strength does not mean that we will lose the battle!
Points to Ponder:
Do you feel like you are running out of track?
Do you allow God to lay new track constantly?